To protect children from fall injuries, play areas have been required to be provided with safety surfaces. A safety surface may be required to underlie and/or cover a play area on which children may fall. The area may typically be associated with playground equipment, such as “jungle gyms,” swings and horizontal ladders, or with gymnasium equipment, such as parallel bars, gymnastic rings and climbing ropes. A fall from such playground equipment or gymnasium equipment can be from an elevation several times a child's height. The safety surface is intended to cushion the fall by attenuating impact forces associated with the fall.
Safety surfaces may be also be mandated by requirement, or recommended as “best practice,” for other play areas and recreational areas as well, such as in zones along paths and adjacent to “whirls”/“roundabouts” and rock climbing walls.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires that all public playgrounds be accessible to disabled people. ADA standards require a unitary (continuous or with minimal gaps) safety surface such as poured-in-place rubber or edge-joined rubber tiles, so as to provide wheelchair accessibility. These surfaces can be relatively hard and do not provide much cushion to protect children from falls. An additional drawback to unitary surfaces is lack of durability.
Formation of unitary surfaces from interlockable tiles may contribute to overall durability of such surfaces. Formation of unitary surfaces from interlockable tiles may contribute to overall durability of such surfaces by allowing for modular replacement of worn areas of the surfaces without the need to replace the entirety of the surfaces. Formation of unitary surfaces from interlockable tiles may facilitate maintenance of such surfaces.
More durable cushioning unitary surfaces may include interlocked interlockable tiles of natural or synthetic rubber with sub-surface protrusions supporting an upper surface of each tile. The protrusions may be supported from below by a firm substrate underlayer. Resilience and resistance to compression of the protrusions may attenuate impact of a fall upon the upper surface. The resilience and resistance to compression of the protrusions may lend durability to the upper surface.
A drawback to tiles featuring sub-surface protrusions is difficulty of manufacture. Individual tiles may require assembly of multiple components or layers to join an upper layer bearing the upper surface with a protrusion-bearing layer.
It would be desirable, therefore, to provide apparatus directed to, and methods for producing, safety tiles with a unitary (single-piece; one-piece; monolithic) structure, such tiles not requiring assembly of multiple components or layers, and that feature sub-surface protrusions so as to provide good attenuation of impact force to protect children from falls.
It would be desirable, also, to provide apparatus directed to, and methods for producing, interlockable unitary safety tiles featuring protrusions, such tiles facilitating on-site assembly and ease of maintenance of high-quality, safe, durable and accessible unitary surfaces.